'Between Realities' is a one-day symposium addressing diverse
photographic positions, which challenge the prevailing modes of visual
representation and their supposed factual depiction of reality through
the photographic medium.

Several international artists have been invited, who in practice blur
the borders between fact and fiction, thus re-imagining and subverting
the traditional visual conception of the documentary genre.

The intention of the presentations is to open the discussion about the
truth of an absolute ‘objective’ photographic replication of reality. Is
the reproduction of a pictorial unadulterated ‘objective truth’ an
erroneous belief, a goal neither viable nor desirable?

Tuesday, 3 January 2017

"What emerges over time from this immersion in place in Koenning’s practice is
photography as a process of worlding. In The Crossing there is a sense
in which each photograph offers
a miniature portrait of a natural world on the cusp of disappearance. At the same time, there
is ambiguity at play, especially in
Koenning’s arresting images of fish and bird life hovering between states of appearance and
disappearance, or processes of emergence and withdrawal. In Howqua #1 (Falsche Gezeiten, 2015), a tortoise shimmers in
bioluminescent white light and appears as if plummeting into a dark void or
falling through stars. Might this be the last tortoise, hurtling
toward extinction or, more optimistically, can this sole tortoise be read as
a symbol of species survival and thus an emblem of hope? Some
images draw their titles from the work of Michel Serres and, indeed,
The Crossing echoes the French philosopher’s call for “a natural
contract of symbiosis and reciprocity.”
As an embedded and deeply personal response to a transitioning ecology, Koenning’s images
also embody what Zylinska terms a “post-anthropocentric ethics of
expanded obligations.”This is ethics as “a way of taking responsibility, by the human, for various sorts of thickenings of the
universe, across different scales, and
of responding to the tangled mesh of everyday connections
and relations."

"With the experience of being displaced from a homeland comes a
continuous process of re-placement, through transcending traditional
physical boundaries and traditional methods of psychological
interactions. An anti-linear or disjunctive order emerges from this
constant state of interpretation. Imagined borders give way to imagined
worlds and newly created homes. Invariably and spontaneously responding
to what surrounds and inhabits her when photographing, Koenning’s
aesthetic varies, adjusting itself to
the environment and the experiences that produce it, never following a
formula. Just like a continuous shaft of light full of glimmering dust,
constantly fluctuating, and without boundaries, Indefinitely redefines
the notion of distance associated with the migratory experience by
filling it with the most simple and intense visual poems.” — Claire
Monneraye, Curator, Australian Centre for Photography